Retro Review: Hot Night

The review for Hot Night by Shannon McKenna was first published at The Romance Reader in 2006. Back then I rated it 2-Hearts (D grade) with a sensuality rating equivalent of NC-17.  This currently appears to be out of print, with no available digital edition.

+++++

Readers can always count on Shannon McKenna to deliver a hot Alpha hero who lacks a little something in the manners department. Unfortunately, she tends to pair up these hot hunks of beefcake with heroines who have as much spine and personality as your garden-variety jellyfish. 

Abby Maitland slaves away at a museum job for a Devil Wears Prada-like boss. She has just landed a major coup for the museum, a gala event to show off their latest exhibit, a cache of sunken treasure recently recovered that they’re calling The Pirate’s Horde. She’s also decided now is the time to get serious about her love life. No more dating bad boy losers who deplete her checking account and wreck her cars. Nope, Abby now has a “list” and any guy who wants to get serious with her has to meet the criteria. So her fabulous gay friend, Dovey (that’s right, Dovey), has been setting her up on disastrous blind dates with men who fit Abby’s list. You think the girl would get a clue here, but amazingly enough she never does. 

It’s on her latest disaster that she meets Zan Duncan (that’s right, Zan). A locksmith and part-time computer guru of some sort (honestly, the author spends zero time on this other than it makes the hero conveniently rich), he answers Abby’s late night phone call after she locks herself out of her apartment. He arrives, rescues her from her latest blind date from hell, unlocks her door and the conversation laden with double entendres begins. 

But Zan doesn’t fit her “list” criteria, so Abby isn’t interested. Plus, things get really complicated when the evil bad guy shows up on the scene. He wants to steal The Pirate’s Horde and he isn’t going to let anybody or anything stand in his way. 

The plot is over-the-top (seriously, pirate’s treasure?!), but it could have been campy fun if the characters weren’t so annoying. Zan actually starts out very intriguing. He’s sexy, charming and I was thinking about running away with him at first. Unfortunately he’s attracted to Abby, which immediately knocks him down several pegs. She runs so hot and cold over the course of the story, I swear I got whiplash. One minute she’s pushing Zan away because he doesn’t fit her “list,” the next she’s throwing herself at him and putting her mouth on body parts that would send mixed signals to any man. 

Zan really has no chance at all. He cajoles her, tries to persuade her to give him a chance – but she flatly refuses. However, just as he’s about to throw in the towel, here comes Abby playing all hot to trot. Naturally, by about the halfway point the guy is truly confused and the bickering ensues. These two seem to have the same fight over the course of the entire story, and I never could get a handle on it since they talk in circles. But never fear gentle reader, they wait to do their arguing after they have the hot, acrobatic sex. 

Misunderstandings naturally ensue, with Zan leaping to conclusions and behaving like a Neanderthal. Not that I could truly blame him since Abby sends out so many mixed signals I would have gleefully strangled her myself if I were in his shoes. Not only is this all highly annoying to read about, it also sabotages the romance. These two cannot agree on anything, and several important conversations have to be halted because they cannot get along. Seriously, they’re going to have to spend their entire married life naked with duct tape over their mouths for this relationship to have any prayer at all. 

The suspense plot isn’t too bad, but it is overblown given the villain is one-dimensionally evil. Also, Abby somehow manages to become shriller after a dead body turns up. While it’s nice to see an author keeping the legacy of the unapologetic Alpha hero alive and well, coupling these guys with grating heroines is not the way to go. My advice is to keep the aspirin handy, and a bottle of tequila wouldn’t hurt either.

+++++

Wendy Looks Back: McKenna was a fan favorite at the height of the Kensington Brava line known for barely housebroken heroes and steamy sex. While a good many of my reading friends loved her work, I never could quite get there. Her heroes too Neanderthal-y, her heroine's too annoying.  And then her work started to blend in more and more paranormal elements and I was completely out.

Here's the thing though, McKenna's work was always compelling even when I wanted to strangle her characters.  She's self-published some stuff since her Brava days (eh, again with the paranormal elements) but she's got a new series launching this month with Harlequin Desire.  Besides always being here for category romance, McKenna's brand of Alpha hero should be right at home in the Desire line.  I'm intrigued....

Retro Wendy: The “I Only See You” Scene in Jeannie Lin’s My Fair Concubine

This post originally ran on Heroes & Heartbreakers on August 7, 2012 and was part of their Delicious Despair series - posts that talked about emotional "rip your guts out" moments in romances.

When I settle in to read a romance I always hope for two things: 1) that I’ll enjoy the story and 2) that the author will rip my guts out. I love emotional angst. I love moments of delicious despair where the characters are figuratively bleeding on the page. Moments where it seems like all hope is lost, that there is no way to break free. Those are the moments that feed my insatiable appetite for the genre, and it’s such a moment that makes My Fair Concubine by Jeannie Lin so emotionally satisfying. 

Chang Fei Long is a man who is trying to clean up a mess his now deceased father has left behind. In order to do that, he needs to keep the financial turmoil of his house under wraps and secure an alliance with a neighboring kingdom by marrying off his younger sister. The rub is that sister has no desire to enter into this arranged marriage and takes off to be with her true love. Fei Long needs this marriage to happen and since the man arranging it has never met his sister? Why not replace her with a lowly tea house girl? It’s win-win. His family escapes ruin, and Yan Ling, a girl with no future or prospects, gets to live the life of a princess.

What follows is a story set to the Pygmalion theme—a My Fair Lady that takes place in Tang dynasty China. Naturally, as tends to happen with stories of this nature, teacher and pupil end up being attracted to each other, and falling in love. It’s especially poignant here because Fei Long literally has his back up against a wall. This marriage has to take place. If it doesn’t? He’s doomed. His household is doomed. His name, his family’s name, will mean less than dirt. So he feels he must deny his feelings for Yan Ling.

“I think of you, Yan Ling, more than I should.” A wave of longing struck him. “When I see your face at night, I don’t see the tea girl or the elegant lady. I only see you.”  

He could see her now, even though he couldn’t face her.  

“I think of you, too.”  

Her soft confession nearly unraveled him. He had to get this out and be done with it.  

“If I acted on these feelings, if I…if I took what I wanted, it would be an abuse of authority. You’re under my care. That was what I meant when I spoke of our positions. I won’t treat you like that.” His mouth twisted. “As if you’re here for my pleasure.”  

The whisper of silk told him Yan Ling had risen. She approached him while he counted each step with the thundering beat of his heart.  

“You told me I wasn’t your servant,” she said.  

“You aren’t, but that doesn’t change who I am.”  

He turned before she could reach him and took a step away. They had to keep their distance. Yan Ling came closer anyway.  

“The only hours of the day when I’m truly awake…” her lower lip trembled “….are when I’m with you.” 

Not only is it poignant and emotionally draining, it seems so final. How the couple is able to find their way through this moment, a moment that seems to brook no argument, is what makes the happy ending that much sweeter. That, ladies and gentlemen, is romance.

Retro Wendy: Category Romance: More Than Cute Little Books with Dreadful Titles

This post originally ran at Heroes & Heartbreakers on March 10, 2011 making this very much a "time capsule" read. For one thing, I use the word "diverse" - which has taken on a different connotation within publishing since 2011.  Also, Harlequin has closed a number of lines since this post originally ran, and digital publishing has completely changed the "short contemporary romance" landscape. 

All my life, I’ve had a thing for the underdog. The little guy who is not only the odds on favorite to lose, but is expected to do so in a spectacularly epic fashion.

The romance genre is the ultimate underdog in the court of public opinion. Romance readers are used to nobody taking us seriously, to people treating us like brain-dead ninnies, and to the snide remarks that inevitably follow if someone finds out what we like to read. But it’s even worse for the category romance reader. Those of us who like to read The Cute Little Books With The Dreadful Titles. Because not only do we have to deal with the non-romance reading population sneering at us, we also get it from fans of the genre who really should know better.

As a librarian, I spend a lot of time banging my head up against brick walls. One of my favorite brick walls is educating fellow librarians on the genre, and I tend to devote whole talks on just category romance. Why? The number of titles published every month is mammoth, and it’s a diverse sub genre (no, really—it is).

The biggest reason, though? It’s by far and away the most misunderstood branch on the fiction tree. I would argue even more so than the romance genre as a whole. Hey, when even some romance fans deride the category format as “trash,” you know there’s something rotten in Denmark.

I’m often asked what the appeal of the category romance novel is. Why do readers love to read them? The short and sweet answer is that it’s all of the romance, with none of the BS. Ask any romance reader why they like the genre and you’ll get a variety of answers. At the end of the day, however, aren’t all of us there for the love story? We’re there for hero and heroine falling in love and riding off into the sunset. Category romance, with its shorter word counts and fewer pages means that the author has to have an intense focus on the romance in order for the book to work. A category writer cannot mess around. They cannot get sidetracked on a 25-page tangent about the weather, the history of the quaint small town, or the Battle of Waterloo. They need to get to the point. And the point of it all is the romance.

I kicked any lingering snobbery I had towards the romance genre to the curb when I was hired on at my very first professional library job some 10+ years ago. However, I told myself that it was OK to read romance because “It’s not like I read Harlequins!” Seriously, even this librarian can be an idiot. Then one day I actually read one of those “trashy Harlequins” and I fell in love with that strong, intense focus on the hero and heroine relationship. To this day, when I pick up a category romance, that’s what I’m hungry for. Give me the romance, all of the romance, and let nothing else in the story detour me off the road to Happily-Ever-After Land.

I’ll admit it can be easy to make fun of category romances. The titles. The sometimes dippy cover art. The overblown, over-the-top-sounding back cover blurbs that are staples in some of the lines. I also admit that it can be a confusing sub genre to navigate. Even years after a lot of publishers have fled the sub genre, only leaving Harlequin, there’s so much published every month, so many different lines, that for the uninitiated it can be a little confusing. It also tends to enforce the negative stereotype that because the books are in separate imprints, then all the books are somehow the same. Yes, each line might have certain guidelines, but just as there is more than one historical romance out there about an American heiress in London, or more than one paranormal romance out there about vampire hunters, it does not mean category readers are reading the same book over and over again. Likewise, the authors are not filling out some generic template for their books, cranking a story out in a couple of hours.

Seriously, if only it were that easy, right authors?

This nonsensical idea that All The Books Are The Same proliferates across the genre, but nowhere more than in category. Those of us who love them know that this could not be further from the truth. And because I love banging my head against brick walls, over the coming months I plan on highlighting many of the category romance lines and expounding on what makes these Cute Little Books With The Dreadful Titles so great, and so addicting. Hopefully by the end of these posts, even if you aren’t a converted category romance fan, you’ll maybe come to understand a little bit of why so many of us love them. At the very least, I hope that the members of our community will stop throwing some of those slings and arrows our way. Hey, don’t we get enough of that garbage from everyone on the outside?

Retro Wendy: If You Build It, They Will Come: Erotic World-Building

This post originally ran at Heroes & Heartbreakers on August 5, 2012

Even though I’ve currently declared a moratorium on paranormal reading, that does not mean I ignore the subgenre completely; I still buy plenty for my library patrons to read, and I follow many bloggers who are diehard paranormal fans. One thing that is typically always mentioned in reviews for paranormal books is the world-building. Was it good, bad, or indifferent? In some cases, the world-building can make or break a book for a reader—too much and the romance gets lost. Not enough and the reader is slogging through wallpaper. But what about world-building in other corners of romance? 

Any story worth its salt—regardless of genre or subgenre—needs to have decent world-building. It’s what helps transport the reader into the story, as opposed to relegating us to the sidelines where we’re barely interested observers. I love getting lost in a book, sucked in to the point where I don’t want to come up for air. World-building does that for me.

Some of my favorite worlds have been built within the realm of erotica and erotic romance. An excellent example would be Logan Belle’s Blue Angel series. It follows the travails of Mallory Dale, a law student who hangs up her legal briefs for pasties when she gets sucked into the world of the New York City burlesque scene. What Belle has done very well in this series is flesh out that scene for readers. She’s got an excellent back-drop to populate her characters with, she sprinkles in plenty of drama, and gives readers a soap opera feeling against what, for many of us, is an exotic lifestyle.

Megan Hart takes a slightly different approach, especially in her early Spice novels, Dirty and Broken. It wasn’t the setting so much as the characters. She has a way of slyly interesting recurring characters without beating readers over the head with a series-baiting stick. Newcomers won’t feel like they’re missing anything, but fans will get a giddy thrill recognizing and seeing former secondary players again, waltzing across the pages of multiple books.

But as well as Hart does this, Portia Da Costa is the pro. Da Costa has a long and extensive career that carries across several publishers and lines. What I love about her books is that she’s designed her own erotic universe. It’s like all the characters she’s ever created reside in this giant bubble, and they can pop up in any given book.

One couple that the author seems especially fond of is Maria and the enigmatic Mr. Stone. These two got their own book with Entertaining Mr. Stone, showed up in In Too Deep, and even crossed publishers to make an appearance in the recent Carina Press book, Intimate Exposure. Then there was the time the couple from In Too Deep, one of my personal favorites, was spotted in a crowded restaurant scene in Kiss It Better. It detracts nothing for the newbies, but for someone who had read all those stories, it caused my heart to skip a beat.

The misconception with erotic writing is that as long as the author delivers the sex, readers will happily return to the trough to gorge. Is the sex important? Yes, but it’s not nearly enough. For a book we can really sink our teeth into, one that will linger beyond just a few scintillating moments of feeling naughty? We need the characters and we need the world.

What are some of your favorite moments of world-building in erotica and erotic romance?

Retro Wendy: Let’s Talk About Sex, or Not: Sexual Tension For the Win!

This post originally ran at Heroes & Heartbreakers on August 5, 2015

As long as the romance genre has existed, it has had unimaginative critics. Sometimes even before the word “trash” is uttered, we get “Mommy porn.” Women should know their place. If it’s something you enjoy, if it’s something you take pleasure in, it must be wrong, and nothing screams wrong quite like dismissing readers and suggesting they are “dirty” for liking something. What these critics are really reinforcing is the old adage that women shouldn’t like sex, talk about sex, and heaven help them, they shouldn’t want sex. The truth is that if these critics asked a large sample of romance readers why they enjoy the genre, “I read it for the smokin’ hot sex!” is pretty far down on the list, if it’s on the list at all. Oh dear, silly, hopeless naïve critics. We don’t read romance for the sex. We’re looking for all the delicious things that lead up to sex. The tension, the chemistry, the foreplay, two characters who are beginning to realize that taking on the world together is ever so much better than taking it on by themselves.

To illustrate this point, all three of these recent releases, of wildly varying heat levels, illustrate that it’s not the actual falling into bed we love – it’s the journey the characters take to get there.

Charlotte Stein writes erotic romance, a sub-genre that one would think would be “all about sex.” Except, of course, that it isn’t. Good erotic romance knows that it takes more than pages of kink and fetishes to make a story “hot” – to make the romance work. In Sweet Agony, Stein takes anticipation to a boiling point featuring a young woman looking to escape poverty and despair and a young man with a mountain of entitlements emotionally stunted by a past he’s unable to break free of. So haunted by a traumatic past, our hero is emotionally crippled at the mere thought of basic human touch. Which makes navigating a sexual attraction particularly tricky, but leads to a story filled with tension. That old saying about the brain being the biggest erogenous zone? Yeah, that.

He just did the equivalent of throwing everything in on a pair of jacks, so sure I would back down that he barely saw the straight flush lurking in the river. He was too explicit, too rude, too eager to say that word: spanked. He should never have said spanked. Maybe he could have to someone else, someone who cares only a little, someone less like him. But I am not nearly so closed off, nor so silly. And when he pushes, I push back.

...

I glance over my shoulder. I meet his gaze. His face is so pale it could pass for a fainting lady’s. And I say with the most relish I can muster: “Would you like me to leave my dress down, or do you prefer a bare work surface?” followed by the longest silence the world has ever known. It goes on and on and on, and the longer it does, the worse it gets. If nothing happens in the next thirty seconds I am almost definitely going to die. 

In The Fighter and the Fallen Woman, Pamela Cayne is working within a sensuality landscape that is fairly typical for the historical romance sub-genre. It’s in that middle ground between just-kisses and erotic romance. What this story features is a forbidden sexual attraction between a boxer/hired thug hero and a prostitute/mistress heroine who both happen to work for the same dangerous crime lord. The tension between the two hits a boiling point even before the reader is out of the first chapter, when our villain suggests his mistress kiss his fighter for “good luck,” something the hero, King, is reluctant to do.

“Come, King, it’s only a kiss,” Lady said, deliberately pitching her voice low. She would give the kiss and pray her trembling barriers would hold, keep her safe against the desire to close her eyes, breathe in his scent, and feel for one moment that a fighter and a fallen woman had a future together. 

…

“Lady, you should know when it comes to you, it’s never only anything,” he whispered so that only she could hear. “It’s everything.” 

…

He grabbed her hand only for an instant, but it was long enough to brand his touch on her skin before he let go. Lady pulled back and her eyes drifted open, her held breath slipping from her mouth and into his. King was right. This would never be only a kiss. 

Deeanne Gist started her career writing inspirational historical romances, but her most recent books have moved towards secular Americana. This has been a move that has not been met with enthusiasm by all of her fans, and there is criticism, in some circles, that Tiffany Girl is “pornographic.” This is laughable for the most part since the only love scene fades to black while the hero is helping the heroine out of her wedding ensemble….on their wedding night. But upon closer inspection, these critics have somewhat of a point. Gist does more with sexual tension in a “just kisses” historical romance than some erotic romance authors do with an encyclopedia of fetishes and a chest full of sex toys. Things heat up for our hero and heroine when they agree to help a photographer take a series of photographs of them dancing so he can make a phenakistascope.

Now they were cheek to cheek. Flossie’s face, nearest the camera, shielded his. Her ear lobe peeked out from beneath her coif and was within an inch of his mouth. He resisted, resisted, then could resist no more. He took a gentle tug with his lips. 

…

She closed her eyes, her lips there for the taking. He didn’t so much as breathe. “Okay. Ready?” Holliday settled himself beneath his shroud. “Just a few more shots.” Holliday took them through the rest of the dance, one step at a time. When she had her face shielded by Reeve’s, she blew across his ear.

...

The stairwell was silent. The hallway was silent. The rooms were silent. He didn’t know where everyone else was on this sunny Sunday afternoon, but he was thankful they weren’t around.  

He followed her back down to the first floor, narrowing his eyes. Were her hips swaying just a touch more than usual? Or maybe he was simply too attuned to her every move. When she began to enter her room, he grabbed her hand, hauled her to his room, shoved his door closed, pulled her against him, and took her mouth with his. 

All of these authors employ the use of tension to increase the personal stakes for their characters. Cayne introduces it to the reader from the very first chapter, in a first kiss scene the simmers and boils through the remaining early portions of the book and carry the reader to the eventual consummation. Stein and Gist both go a different route, keeping their characters apart by circumstance. Stein, with a hero who abhors anyone touching him and Gist with the social restrictions and mores of the time period. However, in the case of all of these books, something has to give. All of these characters are mere mortals, after all, and tension can only go on for so long until someone eventually snaps. It’s those delicious moments that lead up to the snapping that keep romance readers coming back for more.